I’m trying this year to make a concerted effort to shift more of my teaching into collaborative sites to make the most of collective intelligence. I’m really pleased that the Year 9 English team I work with has once again enthusiastically embraced the use of Ning across the year level to support our learning. What’s even better is that the Yr 10 teachers have decided to use a Ning platform across their English classrooms as well. I’m especially pleased about this because the students who enjoyed writing in the Ning last year have some continuity and input into their learning.
I’ve known about Wallwisher for awhile but didn’t see a use for it with the work I was doing with my students. I don’t like to use applications like this gratuitously; it has to be meaningful to what we are doing in class. This week we were doing character analysis and it came to me that Wallwisher might be useful to track our thinking. Our task has been to find quotes from the novel we are reading (Bye, Beautiful by Julia Lawrinson) that help us with our understanding of the characters. We’ve created walls for Sandy, Frank, Billy and Marianne and the links to these have been pasted into a text box on the Ning so that everyone has easy access to them. Here’s an example of the wall with quotes applicable to Sandy;
What we are doing is leveraging our collective intelligence for the good of the group. Eventually, we’ll be writing an essay related to this text and the students will be able to access these walls to see if there may be quotes there that are useful to use as supporting evidence for the points they are making.
I can see Wordle would be useful to create a word bank of descriptive terms related to the novel and specific characters. If you’ve got ideas for other sites I could be using I’d appreciate leveraging the collective intelligence of my readers!
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
Well done with all the collaborative projects at school, Jenny. Thanks for reminding me about Wallwisher and for the great example. You sent me on a search for Wallwisher uses. I rediscovered 16 ways to use Wallwisher in the classroom.
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_436f8kscmdc
Might have to play with this.
Thanks for the link Tania. I’ll be checking that one out. : )
Hi Jenny,
You could use http://www.cozimo.com as a collaborative tool if you were getting the students to write quotes on a picture.
I use wallwisher as a feedback site for how my lessons are going but I will look at the slide show in the previous post and see what I can use it for.
Andrew
Thanks for the link to Cozimo Andrew. Just signed up. : )
You might also want to try Online Stickies at http://en.linoit.com/ or Pindax at http://www.pindax.com/ or Stixy at http://www.stixy.com/ as alternatives to Wallwisher. 🙂
Thanks Phil : )
I introduced a ning to my Year 12 class last year and have found it to be a powerful tool in sharing ideas and resources. It became a valuable medium for meaningful discussion related to the studied topics, which was often instigated by the students themselves.